Several
months ago, I had the opportunity to give a co-lecture on the game That Dragon Cancer. At the
time, our teaching team was a little more than midway through our course,
entitled "Stories Everywhere," which is designed to introduce
Stanford freshmen to crucial critical thinking skills by way (at least in our
case) of a series of texts, films, and -- in this case -- games that reflect
the ways in which humans seek to make sense of their lived experiences through
narrative (this course is part of a series created and run by Stanford's Thinking
Matters program).
The game
is a harrowing one to play, especially if you're particularly sensitive to
stories about child illness and loss. It is also a nonfiction/autobiographic
narrative. The creators, Ryan and Amy Green, starting working on this game
after their son Joel was diagnosed with terminal cancer at 12 months of age.
They worked on it throughout the remaining years of Joel's life (he was only
expected to live for a few months after the initial diagnosis, but would
remarkably go on to live for a little over four more years). It is, at heart,
an exploration game -- one that invites you into a series of fourteen vignettes
wherein you inhabit either a first or third person perspective. Players are
guided from one scene to the next, but the simplicity of its form allows the
game to harness degrees of affective power that are all but unmatched in the
video game medium. As many reviewers and players have observed, the game
invites and requires players to inhabit the role of Joel's parents,
experiencing a series of moments that are by turns sweet—helping Joel feed
ducks, holding Joel while he sleeps (see image below)—and traumatizing, such as trying and failing to soothe a screaming, terminally
sick child in the hospital room. That hospital scene, in fact, was the first
vignette that Ryan Green ever created. He wanted to construct a scene that
captured and helped explain the despair that a parent feels in those kinds of
moments, and also his revelation that sometimes there is simply nothing that
you can do.
The game
is infused with abstract, symbolic imagery that requires you to engage in
interpretive, gap-filling work as you move through the narrative. For as linear
as it the game is in structure, the story is deeply fragmented -- as a player,
you are invited to inhabit critical moments in the story, but you are always
aware that there is a significant portion of the story that is being left
untold. Compellingly, the faces of all the characters are blank, and this was
-- according to Ryan -- both a result of the limitations of the small
development team and a deliberate choice. They felt that in leaving the faces
undistinguished, it would be easier for others to imagine themselves in the
world of the game. It also occurred to me, as I listened to the podcast "The Cathedral"
(it provides a goodly amount of backstory on the game's production and on the
Greens’ story), played through the game, read additional interviews, and
listened to Adam Johnson lecture on the mechanics of trauma narratives in our
Stories course, that the creators may well have used abstraction and the
vignette structure as a way of deliberately distancing themselves from the story.
As Adam pointed out to our students, the telling of a trauma narrative *can* be
a cathartic and healing one for the traumatized individual, but only under
certain conditions that vary from person to person. The traumatized person, in
other words, may feel a strong need to tell their story, but they must do so in
a way that does them good instead of harm. Otherwise, story-telling becomes
either damaging or downright impossible. The abstraction, symbolic imagery, and
even the shifts from first to third person, then, seem to be a way of creating
just enough distance so that the creators could bear to tell the story of their
son's battle with cancer and his eventual death. How could they have born the
creative and development process, in other words, if they had forced themselves
to stare at their son's face the entire time?
The
motivations for the game evolved as Joel's treatment and prognosis evolved, and
in the end (as recounted in the podcast) the family came to see That Dragon Cancer as Joel's memorial.
So much so that they decided against purchasing a tombstone for Joel so that
they could put that money towards the completion of the game (they were in
desperate need of funds to complete it at the time of Joel's passing). They
decided that this game was the best way to honor Joel, and so the decision to
memorialize him through this creative process (rather than through conventional
means) was a natural and seamless one.
Per Holmberg and the Rök stone. Photo by Acke Holmberg (first appeared here) |
Bronwen Tate and I worked on the
lecture for several weeks—one that focused on the features of a trauma narrative that unfolds in a video game. I began to draft
up our conclusion, I just so happened to stumble upon an article about the Rök
stone, a Swedish runestone dating to the 9th century. This stone is nothing
short of a marvel, given that the longest found example of runic script is
etched upon it, and it has been the subject of considerable interpretive debate
since it was found over a century ago. Its text is notoriously difficult to
interpret. It begins, as so many runestones do, with a dedication— "In memory of Vämod stand these runes. And Varinn
wrote them, the father, in memory of his dead son"—but what follows
are a series of impenetrable and oblique riddles that provide anything but a
linear recounting of Vämod’s life and deeds. However, Per Holmberg, associate professor
of Scandinavian languages at the University of Gothenburg, has offered up a recent interpretation that works against the
nationalistic interpretations of the previous century. The whole
article – which goes into greater detail on the complicated order in
which Holberg thinks the runes ought to be read—is well worth a read, but the
closing paragraphs of the piece were especially striking to me as I struggled
to find a way to wind our lecture to a close:
If this is the
longest rune inscription ever found in stone, it must have taken its author a
very long time to carve. Why didn't Varinn spend that time writing a
straightforward narrative about how great Vämod was? Were riddles
really the best he could think of to memorialize his slain
son?
Holmberg laughed.
"That's a very good question," he
said.
But here's his
theory: "It's thanks to the technology of writing, Varinn, who
erected the stone and inscribed it with runes, is able to keep us reading and
keep us answering his riddles. And while we are doing this we are almost
forced to commemorate his son."
In other words,
the stone is a celebration of how words can make someone immortal. A
straightforward history of any sort would have placed Vämod and his whole world
squarely in the past. But Varinn's riddles have held researchers in their
thrall for more than a century — and, since Holmberg's theory is likely to
be challenged, probably for many more years to come.
"In Swedish,
we have the phrase 'eternity machine,'" Holmberg mused. It's something
akin to da Vinci's and Tesla's dream of perpetual motion — a hypothetical
machine that would work indefinitely, driven by a power entirely its
own.
"This
written text is like an eternity machine," he continued. "It keeps us
reading. It keeps us commemorating."
A close-up shot of the Rök stone. Photo by Howard Williams. Found here. |
This
part of the article resonated immediately with my experiences playing and
analyzing That Dragon Cancer.
Holmberg’s theory – especially his point that deliberately complicated texts
force us into the process of memorialization and afford the creators and the
memorialized a kind of immortality—seems to me rather indelibly tied to the
affective power and the motivations behind the game. Of course this game would have a non-linear narrative, as does the Rök stone. Of course it would be rife
with symbolic imagery and disorienting abstraction. Of course the family would come to see it, and not a tombstone, as
the best way to memorialize Joel. And so, I offered this in closing to our
students: that the game, for all its innovation and seeming “newness” channels
and reflects an impulse to memorialize that
is quite ancient, an impulse that lies at the heart, perhaps, of human’s
desires to tell these kinds of stories -- whether they be a grieving parent in
9th century Sweden, or a grieving parent in the now. In this sense they invite
us, as I
once wrote of Pearl, into a “strange
and beautiful communion with all who have (and all who will) endure painful
loss.”
Fast
forward to NCS 2017: London, where Randy Schiff gave a fantastic paper on Pearl in one of Kristi Castleberry’s and
my Narrative Conduits session. He made a passing, but crucially important,
observation that Pearl is—in so many
ways—a deliberately difficult/challenging poem, and in that instant I was immediately
reminded both of the Rök stone and of this game. I still have a lot of thinking
to do on this, but Randy’s comment made me wonder: to what extent might we
think of Pearl as a kind of eternity
machine? If we ascribe to the theory that it was written by the author in
memory of his (or a patron’s) dead child, then to what extent might we
understand the luminous complexity of its verse in terms of this very impulse to
memorialize? Put differently, to what extent does that luminous complexity and
abstraction—that careful balance between affective involvement and constructed
distance—serve as evidence that this is a poem inspired by profound (and, as
Dan Kline has stressed
so beautifully) deeply personal loss?
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